• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 02 / 05 / 2011

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San Francisco Chronicle February 4, 2011 04:00 AM. The announcement by the Obama administration last month that it will reinstate policies of the Clinton administration to permit travel to Cuba for religious or educational reasons reminded me of two trips to Cuba that I made during the time of the Clinton administration.

I went there under an exemption permitting travel to Cuba by journalists. I traveled there legally, in other words, possessing papers from the Treasury Department confirming my right to do so. I flew to Kingston, Jamaica, and there boarded a short Air Jamaica flight to Havana.

The plane was jammed with young Americans, not one of whom was legally authorized to make the trip. These were backpackers who were simply making the trip in open defiance of U.S. regulations. On landing in Cuba, their passports were not stamped by Cuban customs officials, and no evidence existed that they had made the trip. Nearly all of them, as far I could see, then took buses into Havana and proceeded to find private-home accommodations where they could stay. (The Cubans permit private families to set aside a room in their homes to accommodate paying tourists.)

In other words, more important than the formal exemptions under the regulations was a general lack of interest on the part of the Clinton administration in enforcing the embargo against American travel to Cuba. Our government had simply decided not to waste money or manpower on it.

And this, to my mind, is the probable atmosphere that the new exemptions for religious and educational travel will reinstate. There will be dozens of charter flights to Havana by religious organizations, but few of the religious organizers will really be paying close attention to the beliefs of the people joining those flights; anyone wanting to do so will probably be permitted to join the trip for "religious" reasons.

And because there will be such a heavy number of American "religious tourists" to Havana, there also will be a large number of Americans traveling there without joining a religious charter. They will simply take a flight to the Bahamas, Jamaica or Cancun, and then board a short connecting flight to Cuba. They will risk such trips in the belief that our American government will be less than fervent in its enforcement of the travel embargo. I am not recommending such illegal conduct, but simply predicting that attempted avoidance of the embargo will be widespread.

All of this highlights the absurdity (and counterproductive nature) of that embargo. When you visit Havana, you find - as I did - that the streets are filled with tourists from all over the world: Canadian tourists, British tourists, French tourists, German tourists, Japanese tourists, tourists from all over. In particular, Canadians booking air-and-land packages from Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa to Cuba are currently flooding into Cuba and enjoying the low costs of high-rise Cuban resorts in Varadero Beach, in Holguin, Cayo Coco and elsewhere.

Many such flights leave Canadian cities every week. The fact that Americans cannot join them is heavily resented by many Cubans.There is hope that Congress will ultimately put an end to this counterproductive policy.

Source: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/04/TRHI1HC4IT.DTL